While I currently live in another state, I grew up only twenty miles from Hazelton and I know the area very well. I find the whole stink quite ironic, since Hazelton proper has been a quaint little shit hole for years, long predating the recent wave of immigration. The town grew up around coal mining, but the mines closed in the 1940s and 1950s. The area leaders got together and did a fairly smart thing - they developed a very successful business park (called CANDO - bad name choice, perhaps) which, combined with the town's strategic location at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Interstate 81, helped bring jobs back to the area. It was too late for the city proper, however. Most retail business moved out of town to the local mall, Wal-Mart opened up a SuperCenter a few years ago, and downtown Hazelton was dying a slow death. Since the business park was outside of town, most people working there tend to live in the suburbs or surrounding rural areas, where land is cheap and plentiful. The business park attracted Hispanic workers too, however, moving west from New York City looking for better (and cheaper) places to live that still had good jobs. Unlike their local compatriots, these migrants felt more comfortable living in an urban environment, so Hazelton had something of a renaissance in the downtown, and especially in the Hispanic areas. Still, rural redneckery persists strongly, and so the locals elected Barletta to "clean the 'spics out". This is doubly ironic, since most of those locals are from ethnic immigrant roots themselves and probably have family pasts either in heavily persecuted organized labor or in Italian organized crime (the mafia had deep roots in Hazelton for quite a while). The locals might say that it's about crime, but Hazelton was not a nice place to live in before the Hispanics came, and it hasn't gotten much better since the crackdown spurred a lot of them to leave (take, for example, the most recent double shooting - neither shooter nor victims were Hispanic, yet someone all the city's problems can be laid at the immigrant's feet). If the locals had been willing to embrace the immigrant community, they might have gone a long way towards rebuilding their town. As it is, Hazelton will simply continue its course as one of the area's many decaying industrial centers.

I can see where Mayor Barletta and leaders in similar positions across the country are coming from on this. They are getting screwed with the costs of illegal immigration (although probably not to the extent that he claims, such as all of the violent crime is the result of illegals) and want to do something about it. However, I really do not think a patchwork of town laws is the right way to go about resolving this issue. This really needs to be addressed at a higher level.

The federal government has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration for too long. Had they taken the proper preventative measures ages ago this would not be the case. However, it is easier to ignore the problem and then periodically grant "amnesty" or "guest worker" status then do anything to actually provide long-term solutions. Hell, if you can wangle a new lifetime voting bloc for your party by creating a whole new group of citizens from the "amnesty" then that is just a bonus, isn't it?

Despite his popularity in his hometown of Hazelton, Lou Barletta faces an uphill fight to win the Congressional race for the 11th Congressional District.

On my website, http://www.StopLouBarletta.com, I expalin exactly why I think Lou Barletta should NOT be elected to the United States Congress.